Julie Summers

I had expected to love this book bearing in mind that it is billed as being the book that the 'Home Fires' series is based upon, and I have been enjoying that programme. I didn't expect the melodrama that the TV series tends to veer into, more and more judging by the latest run, but neither was I expecting the very dry recounting of facts here.

I did learn a lot about what country women did towards the war effort, with food production, food preservation, salvage collecting, knitting for the troops, entertainments to raise money for good causes, wild plant gathering for essential medicine production e.g. foxgloves to make digitalis and rosehips for vitamin C production, wool gathering from the hedgerows, Make do and Mend, toy/clothing and other items made for refugees in Europe, supplying all sorts to the Red Cross for POWs, and lots more besides. All with no pay and no transport allowances and everything rationed, the jam makers, for example, not even being able to get back the jam they had made with their own fruit, as it all went into central stores and what you bought and used your coupons for (the coupons didn't pay for anything, they just allowed you to get it if it was available) would be jam someone had made in another village most likely. And this against a background of very basic amenities, with a lot of villages not having mains drains, a lot lacking electricity and some even not having a water supply in the house, as these utilities didn't reach a lot of country areas in the UK until the late 1950s.

However what I missed here was that, although there were extracts from diaries or letters of individual women, they were few in number and I just didn't get the sense of women as individuals, to the extent that when they reappeared in the narrative under another topic - the book is topic based, starting with a history of the WI and then going on to each of the things they helped organise e.g. food production, clothing production etc etc - I couldn't get a sense of who was who. For that reason I have to say this was only an OK 2 star read because it didn't bring the subject alive. And that's a shame because it is a very important subject which hasn't been looked at much in the huge supply of books about civilian life in WWII, which tend to concentrate on what went on in the towns/cities.… (mehr)

Funnily enough, I read this book last even though it was the first one that Summers wrote on the subject. Stranger in the House focuses on the men returning from the war and the effects that the war and separation from hearth and home had on themselves and the women in their lives. In the early 20th century, there was no real understanding of PTSD of which many POW (especially those who were imprisoned in the Far East and worked on the Burma Thailand Railway) suffered. On average, they were only expected to live a further 15 years because of the severity of their wounds and the maltreatment that went on for such an extended period of time. Those that lived beyond this were not considered 'lucky'. Most of the men who returned from war never again connected with their families because they were so changed and nothing of their experiences was ever discussed. Because Summers used secondhand accounts from the wives, daughters, and granddaughters coupled with primary written sources this is a unique perspective on a much discussed topic. 8/10… (mehr)

By the time I got to this book I was starting to get a bit fatigued with the topic of WWII but once I got truly stuck into this book and discovered just how much I didn't know on the topic...I was hooked. Children were evacuated to the countryside during WWII (this much I knew before) but I learned that they were also sent to America, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. Parents weren't especially picky as long as they were away from London. This book is chock full of recollections which recall the 'waves' of children which would leave suddenly only to be called home again especially during the Phoney War when the prejudice against 'townies' coupled with the desire to see their children again prompted parents to yank their kids back to the city. Understandably, the uncertainty of the situation created a lot of anxiety among children and adults alike. The psychological trauma of abandonment had a lifelong effect on most of the children which manifested itself in a variety of ways. Some children never reconnected with their biological family while others felt their foster family was their 'true' family (some were eventually adopted and stayed in their new homes). I had never really given much thought on the intricacies of the evacuation scheme and what kind of result it had on the children and their families so this was an eye-opening reading experience. 9/10… (mehr)